Nests
by ParlorGamesToMe
Summary: "She didn't dwell on impossibilities. Once the red blended with everything else, you could scrub yourself raw and never rid the stain." When Thor and Loki speak to her in unmistakable Russian, Natasha remembers why she came to help S.H.I.E.L.D.


_"Barton's been compromised."_

In a roundabout way, Natasha liked Thor. He was a bit odd, she admitted, and something about him nearly disarmed her; but, she understands that she appeared abrasive and callous and, well, odd.

At first, she thought she'd gone off the deep end. After everything, it was certainly bound to happen, the infamous Black Widow plunging into an irrevocable lunacy. With the stresses of the job, an ill-mannered tesseract, and Clint's abduction added into the muddled mess, she nearly didn't blame herself. Fine, let it bury her. Let it snowball. She could take it, she had always taken it calmly, coolly, because people would always hurt and bleed and die, herself among them, just as sure as the moon settled into the sky.

The god of thunder swiftly entered the jet, completely nonchalant, as though he grabbed his mass murderer brother from flying aircrafts and threw him out into the open sky every day. Still, Natasha blinked, because she can't possibly have heard him correctly: he spoke the tongue of her youth, and Loki responded in kind. It nearly made a peculiar sort of sense; as Loki spoke to them, for a brief instant, she felt like the syllables of something else entirely clouded his words, a sheer cloth over the English, but one she could feel indelibly against her fingertips.

As sure as the sun arranged itself in the moon's place, he spoke her mother tongue.

Hadn't the others sat reposed? Unless the great Captain America spoke Russian- she honestly never knew what to expect of the grand and irksome Tony Stark- they understood the two gods as well.

Though she didn't brush it off completely, Natasha attempted to steer her thoughts elsewhere. Their mission was more important than her admittedly insatiable curiosity.

Then, Tony followed the two gods, as did Captain America, leaving her to fly the jet. She met their escapes with a few choice curse words, ones that she assumed only the gods could decipher. A mist of nostalgia overwhelmed her; even though she had never enjoyed a particularly happy childhood, she still couldn't always fight the insipid emotion.

"_And your actress buddy, is she a spy too? Do they start that young?"_

"_I did."_

Sometimes skirts moved around her like flower petals in the wind, some were white and others pink and some splattered with crimson and she danced and wore veils and sometimes in between she made others hurt; the color red flickered in homes and hearts and bodies and rooms that she should never have gone in and her hair that draped over her eyes so she never forgot the shade. At times, she recalled contorting her body in flawless arabesques and plies and glissades, for she glided as a firebird that captured the movement of the stage. She was a ballerina who had never stretched upon a barre or moved her feet between positions. Wearing a skirt of ash and flesh, she whirled and spun like a music box figurine in another girl's childhood. A corset of bones around her torso, she swayed even as the music faltered and halted, a sound which ceased until they wound it up again.

"Not today, Natalia," she snapped, speaking to herself in a different voice, a sound of that tasted like the inverse of lollipops and strawberries and hot cocoa, a childhood sort of conglomeration; like when mothers cut up the fruit and sprinkled it with a dash of sugar; or laughed as their children colored their tongues green or blue with the help of the treats they snuck; or the chocolate with a dollop of whipped cream on top, even when their parents could hardly afford the delicacy. As she entered the country she bit into American apple pie dreams, ones that had been force-fed into her unwilling mouth. Lies on television screens spoke of kindly mothers and daft but endearing fathers and a whole load of bright-eyed, happy children who always got into mischief, but within twenty two minutes, discarded their problems and never encountered them again. Manically, commercials blared: buy this and be forever joyful; lose those pounds, that frown, those misfortunes, that unbearable hunger. See him and her and all of them who found the secret to bliss in between the size ten font of a magazine advertising the ten secrets to a happier you.

As if, she ridiculed, anyone knew anything about why they ached. People were covetous and cruel and selfish and they covered their attitudes with a false modesty, with a woeful _why-me_ philosophy. They wanted realms in their fleshy, sweat-covered palms. Every human did, no matter their title or their nationality or the appearances etched into their skin.

Natasha hated, but she still loved in a simmering flame that boiled everything over, silver frames bending inwards at the heat's behest. She told lies as easily as asking a vendor for lemonade. With a lipstick kiss on someone's cheek or her fingers on their holster, she dealt mercy and retribution with the same hued hands, because no matter what she did, _she did vice the best._

Sin reminded her of lemons and cinnamon and chocolate chip pancakes that someone made her when she slept in a tiny, hideous place in Budapest. The yellow wall-paper peeled and the space reeked of its previous owners. Often, she found scurrying roommates- cockroaches that never paid their fair share of rent. Kissing her forehead, a man told her a myriad of things that she wished she could believe; truly, she wanted to: to let him inside and not just within that hideous room, but she exuded death, the rot of bodies shedding their very selves.

He dressed her wounds, just as she had his after they slaughtered twenty seven men.

"Not even a fair fight," he sighed after they finished. Snatching his arrows from bodies, he plundered their corpses. Though, to be fair, they had taken something of his within them. He simply retrieved it.

To that, she made no vacuous reply. Instead, she straightened her posture and tapped the navy carpeted hotel room floor. Long ago, her tolerance for small-talk and meaningless drivel dissipated. She never regained it.

"You got more than I did," noted the blonde man, a cross between impressed and jocular. At his temple, blood dripped from a shallow cut. A knife had cut a swath across his stomach. With a light, disconnected touch, like she dreamt the whole thing, later Natasha cleaned his wounds, stitching them up for good measure. He thanked her with a kiss that she wrenched herself from, like his lips tasted of brimstone and not the lemonade he bought them a few hours previously.

It wasn't, she told herself, that she didn't want to hurt anyone. To be perfectly honest, she was quite comfortable in the area of dealing scars. Honestly, their dalliances symbolized nothing but lemonade laced delusions and cinnamon sprinkled fabrications. When one saw them, they gleaned only the single layer, because they couldn't turn anything but countless blank pages. He felt naught but the exhilaration of the battle and gratitude for her consideration.

Besides, strength and solidarity suited her. She wore her mantle well, a fabric that brushed her thighs and covered her eyes in an indistinguishable veil. As soon as she finished cleaning him up, she sent him out the door. He did not apologize, but he didn't need to. She knew his opinion, for she could observe it in his visage. However, she saw no repentance, not as he ambled out the door. It took her a minute to close it, because her eyes lingered on his retreating figure.

"If I had known you would return, I wouldn't have shown you the way here." she remarked coldly the next day when the other assassin knocked on her door.

"You look hungry," he responded cheerfully. The sadness in his eyes- remnant from the previous night- hadn't entirely abated. Natasha hated games, so she folded her arms across her chest. "Ravenous, actually, and it just so happens that I brought enough pancakes to feed an army."

"Then do not waste them on me," Natasha replied glibly, her posture wound very tight and her expression even more so. "I'm sure others would enjoy them more. I'm not hungry, Barton." With a smile that rankled the redhead, he chuckled and walked past her, into the room. Contentedly, he did a sort of half-leap, landing square in the middle of her bed.

"No one can refuse chocolate," the blue-eyed man informed her seriously. "Tasha, please. Just ten minutes, you'll see. If I still annoy you, I'll go. I can take a hint." Steely-eyed, her expression told him the contrary. Nonetheless, he grinned brightly. She half-wanted to smack the expression off of his face.

Grandly yanking off the crimson cloth patterned with flowers, he revealed a basket holding utensils, plates, syrup, and some ambrosial scented chocolate chip pancakes. His manner reminded her of a poor stage magician, all patter and show without a hint of actual enchantment.

A startling famine arose from within Natasha. Unable to decipher its origin, she paused. Heavier than it should have been, the moment swung over her like a pendulum. Her fingers traced the door hinge; she understood what she had to do.

"Maybe," Natasha acknowledged slowly, shutting her door. "I can take a few bites. After the battle, I may have neglected myself. Besides, it's rude to send guests away."

"See, manners, those are important." acknowledged the man, a broad smile extending across his face. With great pomp and circumstance, he handed her a plate, a fork and knife, and the cloth to use as a makeshift napkin ("Hey, I shouldn't be expected to remember _every_ single detail."). Trying not to belie her voraciousness, Natasha selected a pancake. Of course, she made sure to choose the one with the most chocolate chips. She wasn't _that _far gone. Raising his eyebrows, the other assassin observed her. Natasha was never one predisposed to delicacy; she finished her first pancake before he did, and then moved onto another and another.

The grin on his face slashed her like the sharpest of knives. She hardly desired to be held accountable for him or for his happiness. No more shades of red needed to be mixed within her veins, a constant screaming within her cells that never hushed.

So, she ate and ate and ate and though she didn't intend to, she faced him in a challenge over who could consume the most pancakes.

"I win again." Natasha told the blue-eyed man smugly, arranging her fork and knife on her plate, as if she had used them and not her hands. Honestly, the notion tempted her, but only Barton succumbed.

"Damn," the man said, but he punctuated it with a smile so brilliant, the glow danced inside her eyelids. "I guess we'll have to find something else I'm good at."

"Breaking and entering?" she suggested with a sly smirk. From his playfully narrowing eyes, she hadn't supplied the answer he insinuated.

"Most burglars don't bring pancakes."

"I also get to pummel most burglars." Natasha countered, almost wistfully. Wiping the cloth against her chin, she looked over at him tauntingly. "Though, I suppose with you it would never be a fair fight."

"You think that I would lose?" he said, intrigued. Setting the plates and other detritus on the table, he cleaned up as best as he could. The mess had settled in long before he arrived. "What made you come to that conclusion?"

"I," she grinned coyly, abandoning her role. "Always win." Then, before her mind and body caught up with each other, she kissed his lips; quicker than he could remind her of their singular exception, she proved her point and then some.

"_I will not touch Barton, not until I make him kill you, slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he'll wake up just long enough to see his good work and when he screams, I'll split his skull! That is my bargain, you mewling quim."_

Loki's words washed over Natasha. Perhaps, though she liked to pretend she had played him entirely, her fear snuck in, emanating off of her like a cheap drugstore perfume, the kind you can smell from a mile away, all roses and lilacs and obvious chemicals. Still, in a way, it amused her to hear his thick Russian in the midst of a threat. It certainly reminded her of home more than anything else.

Sin became a part of her as soon as the words could escape in gust of wind from her mouth; they never tasted lollipops and strawberries and hot cocoa, because only good children remembered sweetness and sunlight upon them.

When Clint came to her, she allowed him to pull her cherry colored knitted sweater over head. As they kissed, she wondered if he tasted ash on her tongue and blood on her slick lips. She could feel it trickling. He hardly complained, whispering her name like a secret only he knew, an incantation, a summoning, pure witchcraft that he used against her until his name flew from her lips in a moment of weakness. Carefully, she made sure not to harm him, because of the two of them, he was more breakable and not just because of the twine she had used to sew him back together.

That night, when she let him sleep in her bed, she pretended to slumber. Nights often left her awake, a cup of coffee in hand to combat the insomnia. If she closed her eyes, she wondered if something would carry her off to land where women with red hair smiled and slept and danced instead of killed.

The invocations never worked for her.

Instead, when the clock marked the witching hour and she thought Clint long asleep, his arms moved around her, holding her so close she could feel his heartbeat. He murmured promises into her ears. _I will always love you and protect you and no harm shall befall you and I will never abandon you, so tough luck, and I will always bring you pancakes and clean your wounds and make you happy in whatever way I can and one day I will tell you this when you can hear me, because I would never lie to you, Tasha. _

She was, first and foremost, an assassin. However, on nights when moonlight trickled onto her windowsill and warmed her bones, it stirred her to thrust aside the sheets and dance, her barefoot against cold, wooden floors. Like an ancient memory, one trapped in resin, she could almost recall the steps of a red-haired ballerina's sway.

To her astonishment, Natasha fell into a slumber where her parents dressed her in bows and patent leather shoes; where they cut up mangoes and watermelon and peaches, arranging them on rose patterned china; where, during the day her mother took her to a ballet class and at night slept in a warm bed instead of a frigid box; where she spun in circles, lying on her back on a merry-go-round as birds sang; where she had never smelled fire on flesh; where she snuggled into a nest made of knitted sweaters and linen sheets and bow-strings.

After she awoke again, they both dressed only to peel off each other's clothes. He showered her in coffee kisses. In her most fevered moments she spoke to him in Russian, her words unknown to him, but the meaning so apparent.

Afterwards, she told him stories in her original tongue, dumb things like the her favorite color or what his eyes reminded of him, and heavier things like the first time someone really harmed her and the first time she killed another. She told him stories she faintly recalled being described, filling things in when the details became blurry. Her Russian confessions darkened their days and illuminated their nights. As the twilight faded, they reverberated against the walls of skulls until the assassins heard nothing else. And Clint heard her as she spoke; unto him, she bequeathed her secrecies. In the same breath, they were the songs and they were the screams that ushered in sleep and withheld it.

As he watched her, intent and so enamored, she nearly ran out his arms and out the door into the nighttime streets of Budapest.

Fighting against her instincts, she stayed. Maybe because his arms were warm and so were his eyes or she was full from the new sensations or she didn't want to head closer again to unsavory waters, but she let him whisper in her ear. More importantly, she let herself listen.

He told her of carnivals and shots that never missed and parents who did and how he sometimes felt like a sideshow attraction. With a wink, he told her his favorite color, as if she couldn't already guess. Stories came from his lips that he had never uttered before, jagged words that cut the inside of his mouth and mixed with blood.

They spoke English and Russian and in a wordless silence, which soon proved the most effective form of communication that they had ever encountered.

It was, Clint had told her, the most potent sort of magic. She just turned around, away from him and towards the brown wallpaper covered in questionable stains. She took no stock in the supernatural.

Two days later, they left Budapest together. Though she never recognized Clint's vow aloud, she let him put his hands in her pocket and kiss the top of her head and make her chocolate chip pancakes.

_"Is this love, Agent Romanoff?"_

_ "Love is for children. I owe him a debt."_

Under skies blanketed with embers and flame, she remembered his eyes on her, on her hair and her empty hands and her bleeding body, the first and only time that he nearly defeated her. Never again would she allow him to win. With his vibrant purple clothes and his arrows and his hair rumpled from the fight, she thought he looked, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Though being at someone's mercy certainly wasn't a novel feeling, she never stopped loathing it. With her palms up and her eyes flickering with sparks, she knew what he had to do. One arrow would pierce her, and then another and other until her body was riddled with holes. If he hesitated, maybe she could strike.

Loudly, his bow clattered against the ground. With bewilderment, she glanced up at him, anticipating a trap. If she could get to the bow, or even better, her gun…hell, she could even launch herself and snap his neck.

To her shock, he held out his bruised knuckled hand, blood dripping from a cut. He waited, his blue eyes so light and kind that they pained her more than a thousand arrows ever could. Unsure, she took one step, then another: nothing. He didn't move.

Before she could decide to kill him, she placed her hand in his, instantly crossing out plans written in black, meticulously typed ink, a crimson dash that bled unceremoniously upon the paper.

After he pled and pled, Natasha cautiously taught Clint a bit of her first language. He knew enough to get by, a rudimentary accumulation: pleasantries, how to order at a restaurant, how to tell if someone was going to kill you (Natasha insisted, though she never elaborated as to why, because the expression on his face would make her blush and then he would claim that maybe she did love him after all), and also a few curse words, because he begged especially for those. As a joke, she taught him the word for duckling, claiming it as the foulest profanity to call another. A year and a half later, he looked it up online and didn't speak to her for nearly a week.

She did not teach him words of affection, those phrases so sweet and bitter at once that she discarded them from her vocabulary. In the end, she preferred to speak in rough, harsh syllables, in fists, in guns, communications that left bruises and open wounds.

"You hungry?" he asked her after a particularly grueling mission. Even then, the S.H.I.E.L.D markings on Natasha's uniform unnerved her, like she wore another woman's markings. They clothing felt like a cloak of feather against her skin, a cage, a reason to soar away from everything.

"We can't go out anywhere in this state." replied Natasha pointedly, indicating their torn clothing and his bloodied body. Already, she sported a black eye and bruise on her collarbone. "We don't exactly look covert."

"So we can order in," he suggested brightly, running his uninjured hand through his grimy hair. "I'm sure pizza delivery guys won't even blink. We'll just take a shower, fix ourselves up. By the time we're done, the pizza'll be there."

"Pizza?" she said with a small curve of her lips. They'd eaten pizza two nights before, and for breakfast one morning, too. "Make it Chinese food, and I'll reconsider."

"Fair enough." he agreed, like they were on the usual sort of date, like this was his idea: take in a show, get some dinner. Like, she thought wryly, they would ever call this a date. "S.H.I.E.L.D is paying, anyway, so we can get anything we want."

"Well, that makes everything different," she nodded, taking his hand in hers. "I suppose that after we're all clean, you would be up to a challenge?" Intrigued, he raised his eyebrows. Natasha didn't comment any further as she climbed down the fire escape of the building. He followed her, weaving in and out of alleyways and nighttime streets scattered with unpleasant people. People harmless compared to them, nearly saints who prayed at an altar of bones and honey.

"A challenge?" he wondered as they snuck inside their sleazy, S.H.I.E.L.D paid-for hotel. She opened the door for him, ushering the archer inside.

"Of course," she nodded. With a flourish, let him inside the hotel room. Cat-like, she beamed at him. "After your abysmal performance tonight, I've decided to give you a second chance to prove yourself."

"Because you're so generous?"

"Because I am so _incredibly_ generous."

"Tell me, Tasha, what shall I be beating you at?"

"Don't be so cocky," she laughed, dabbing at his cuts with a cloth. Holding up a bottle of alcohol to clean his wounds, she took a more serious tone. "It's going to hurt, Clint." She poured a bit into his wound. Judging from his countenance, it stung.

"Well?" he inquired, taking the cloth and the bottle from her hand when she finished on him. He dabbed at her temple and brushed some stray hairs from her eyes.

"Tell you what: since I am, as we confirmed before, so generous, I will let you choose the food tonight. That, of course, is the easy part. Once you drain S.H.I.E.L.D dry, then we will see who can finish the most." Natasha said, not even wincing as he poured the alcohol on a particularly deep cut. Every time he did that, even then, Clint always apologized as though he had wounded her horribly.

"That's not a challenge," Clint said bravely. "Not even a little."

"Hmmm, what is the score on our favorite test of daring? I believe it's fifteen to three, Clint, with me taking the definitive lead. Fifteen to three."

"Don't get cocky," he mimicked, though not a trace of venom lurked in his voice.

"I have a reason to be." she grinned. With her lips so unbearably close to his ear, she murmured the next part. "Now, order, and I'll meet you in the shower, if you're fast enough."

"I," Clint said, imitating her tone, his words unthinking. "Am _always _fast." She sneered, and he couldn't help but chuckle a little.

"I'll see you in there, Speedy." Natasha called out behind her. As she departed, the expression on his face made her feel as if she was a doll of twine and pine straw, a crude thing torn apart by childish hands. Unstrung.

Steam curled around her as she turned the water as hot as she could make it. Scalding, even, as if it could melt her skin away and leave a pile of bones over the drain. Breathing the vapor, her lungs began to clear, all the sin and exhaustion exiting as she exhaled. Rust veined her eyes and coated her ribs.

After a few minutes when the water no longer pained her as much as she liked, she heard the door open, something hitting the floor, and the sliding rings of the shower curtain. Affectionately, his hands encircled her waist and his lips brushed her ear. He nuzzled her neck.

Instead of speaking, she sighed, pressing her body to his as the haze rose around them, obscuring the room and even his face. She liked it better that way; though she certainly wouldn't voice it, she hated the lines forming on his face. Not because they made him less handsome, but because they stood in such stark contrast with her own smooth, flawless visage, clear as the day they injected her with a stagnant destiny, mainlining abnormality. It was simple truth: he would age, crumbling into a pile of dust because one day his sharp senses would fade and his eyes would cloud and he would make a single mistake that maybe she couldn't save him from. Standing at his grave, she would survey the unmarked earth, her face unchanged, youthful, a perversion of cycles.

One thing she learned that still prickled her: graves always took a year or so to settle. Until then, they remained headstone-less, just an expanse of covered earth. It never seemed fitting. She never could wait for the tectonic plates to align.

At the thought, she untangled herself from his grasp. Roughly, she pushed his arms off of her body. Sometimes, she felt so pathetic; the sentiment more than unsettled her, for if she hadn't herself, well what did she have?

"Tasha," he said softly, unsettled by her sudden coarseness. "I'll…I'll let you win, if it makes you feel better." He gave a weak laugh, and though she couldn't tell amidst the running water, she thought she spied tears at the corners of his blue eyes.

Natasha couldn't recall the last time she wept. As a general rule, she avoided the whole charade. It was messy and snot-filled and thoroughly undignified. She channeled one deplorable emotion into a more acceptable one, at least considering her area of expertise.

She didn't expect him to cry, to blubber and sob, a childish keen. His fists balled, pounding the shower wall.

"You don't need to let me win, Clint, though you should probably prepare your concession speech," she said finally, turning around. With a careful touch, she pulled him away from the shower wall and into her open arms. "You know that I'll always find a way to get through."

"That's not what I'm worried about." he confided, comforting himself in her embrace. She could feel his tears falling down her skin, liquid hotter than anything she'd ever felt. Wrapping herself around him, a balm, she expected nothing but his wails. Against the top of her head, he spoke in a faint, unmistakable dialect, saying words she had never taught him. He declared his love in a Russian blur; clumsily, his mouth formed all the words she never let herself say, so she simply clasped him tighter and allowed him to speak for the both of them.

"_Barton told me everything."_

She wanted to slam Loki to the ground, to hold a blade against his throat and cut his skin, only to finally, tranquilly ask him to describe each and every intimate thing Clint had ever told him. Instead, the god reciprocated with stories that cut them both to the bone, a clear slash.

In dim rooms, she often told Clint little secrets, pressing them to his chest and his neck and his lips. Told him of fires and bodies and Loki was right, because they all dripped and dried on her hair, staining her cheeks ruddy, like they were kissed by the cold. Did he describe the death that she dealt, stopping only there as Loki wished? Or did he linger on the parenthetical?

Did he talk about nights where the flames blazed and others where ice cracked windows and floorboards? Did he inform Loki of her ragdoll silences and moonflower passions? Did he betray just as she did, speaking all the while in halting amateur's Russian?

Fool, child, make a wish on raven's wings and let your might-have-beens fall with charcoal feathers. Though an intense wave of mortification swept over her, a great deluge, she composed her open stage face.

"_Can you? Can you wipe out that much red?"_

The thought nearly amused her: an impossible conundrum. Can you snatch a horrible truth from the air after you've voiced it? Can you bring a dead man back into his household and seat him at the foot of the table, watching as he eats once more? Can you take a child's painting and remove the mixed colors until white reappears? Can you piece together a raven's bones after you have shattered them?

She didn't dwell on impossibilities. Once the red blended with everything else, you could scrub yourself raw and never rid the stain.

"_I don't understand. Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out and send something else in? Do you know what it's like to be unmade?"_

"_You know that I do."_

Of course he did, of course he understood. Both of them were not composed of alternate things. Kindred in their tragedies, they moved through the same sickening spheres. She had once spoken to him of red rooms and bodies that changed but names that did not and women metamorphosing within each other.

In her sleep, Clint once informed Natasha, she moved. Not too noticeably, but he watched her more than she liked. Her body curved, her legs bent, and once or twice, he saw he thrust away sheets with her eyes firmly closed. On the floors, her feet moved, and to his shock, he realized that she danced so gracefully that his jaw dropped.

"Tasha?" he called, and in the recesses of her mind. As she dreamt of a rapt audience, the muddled sound droned like a mosquito's whine. In their hands, the audience held blades and pamphlets alike. They all smelled of blood. Again, the sound of her name echoed. It nearly rose above the music. With a chill running through her veins, she woke up quite suddenly. He had scooped her up in his arms, since she had been heading towards the partly open window. In the summer heat, they wore precious little.

Without much of a thought, she managed to twist herself around, only to kick Clint to the ground. It took her a second to regain her consciousness.

"You didn't have to do that," he frowned, lying on the floor. Grumbling, he massaged his arm.

"Shit, I'm sorry. I thought…I thought I was somewhere else." she held out her hand, which he gratefully accepted.

"I was just trying to keep you from heading out the window," he explained. "Really, I swear. Are you all right?"

"Yes, just a little disconcerted," she nodded, feeling quite foolish and tad bit more shaken. "I didn't mean to hurt you like that."

"Only you could beat me up in your sleep," he grinned, then stopped when her face remained somber. "It wasn't a good dream, was it?"

"They never are," she said with a dry laugh. "Come on, let's get back to bed. We have a job to do tomorrow, and I'd prefer to be fully awake."

"I wouldn't let them hurt you, I swear." he vowed urgently, pausing to stare at her.

"That's very sweet, Clint, but also completely useless- not to mention unnecessary. It's long over, what I dreamt of, and besides, you know very well that I do not depend on your protection."

"Of course you don't, Tasha," he answered, an odd expression on his face. "I know that, I really do. I just wish I could take out the hurt inside of you."

"I'm fine, Clint. Don't infantilize me."

"I'm not. I never have. This isn't me trying to be some sort of big strong man. It's love, you know: I can't see you in pain, I just can't. I'll always want to do something about it, to make things better."

"This isn't love," she scoffed, pulling a thin sheet over her body. The ice in her veins hadn't abated. If anything, it magnified, freezing the marrow in her bones.

"Call it what you like," he smiled widely, confidently as if he won already. "I think we both know what this is."

"I like it better when you don't talk." she retorted.

"That can be arranged." he responded, the smirk widening. Natasha sat up, a similar smile on her face. Without another word, she bit his bottom lip until it drew blood. She climbed onto his lap only to push him down onto the bed. True to his word, he didn't speak, but they communicated in other ways.

"_Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer, pathetic!"_

To this, Natasha nearly laughed derisively in the god's face. Change? As if she could make up for anything, as if she wanted to cleanse the salt and sin; no, she didn't need absolution: she needed a fellow malefactor, a man-in-arms, because she did wrong and so did he, but they didn't do it alone anymore.

Yes, it wasn't about pardon, but about continuation, about turning the spokes that stilled.

In her mind, Natasha never felt safe. It came with the job, she supposed. Men attached Frankenstein wires to her head with permanent glue, the silver intertwining with the crimson as they shot her full of lightening sparked with women that possessed her eyes but never their shine; and her mouth but never the words that seeped out of it; and her heart, but never the way it beat.

Of course she acted selfishly, bartering for a man who she never loved- never, never, never, because everything she loved burned and crumbled, tucked away in a tomb of rubble and embers.

Still, with composure, she faced him, summoning other girls into her eyes and mouth and heart, draping her paling skin in phantasms until he thought he saw her splinter.

_ "You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers."_

It stunned her: Loki seemed to adore nothing more than the sound of his own voice. One day, he would speak and no one would hear him.

Of all the things to say, he picked the least terrifying truth, the one that couldn't have shocked her even if he injected it into her veins with a rusty syringe. Coming from a narcissist and a madman, the words enjoyed a tentative but infallible accuracy.

Natasha never deluded herself, at least not in that area. Goosebumps rose on her skin, because he preached his lunatic's gospel to a different audience than he intended. The more she listened, the Black Widow understood: though he articulated with a startling dogma, the god didn't even comprehend that his speech indicated another: a target trapped behind glass.

She felt more like a burglar rifling about in someone else's brain. The poor bastard. If he wasn't such a nutcase, she would have felt more inclined to sympathize. Instead, like that music-box doll, she turned away from him and allowed an entity of sorrow to seize her.

"_You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will _never _go away."_

Two and a half weeks before, Clint begged to take Natasha on a car trip. On a grassy knoll sat a daisy white and yellow house with a bright green wraparound stoop, and on that stoop sat two checkered-cushioned rocking chairs.

"For someday," the archer had assured her as they drove up a winding road. All around them, wildflowers grew, dotting the fields in a plethora of tints, all of them blindingly luminous. "It's nice, isn't it? Okay, it'll need some refurnishing and repair- a lot, but we can maybe go when have days off, and the upstairs is in relatively good condition. Only house around for miles, and the land's ours, too. Well, I mean, ours if you want it to be. I know I'm talking about it a lot without a break and I haven't breathed, but I will- I swear- and you've got that scrunchy look on your face like you do when I've done something excessive and stupid, but I was scared to ask you and this house was cheap, I swear, and I kind of that that we could make something here. Together, I mean- we could make it good anywhere: on this hill, in a castle, in a moldy cardboard box. I just… I thought of you- I thought of _us_. Here, we could have more than a beginning."

The air reminded her of children who grew like beanstalks, their leaves outstretched towards the sun, above the clouds. Heavily, it smelled of apple pie and lemonade and crushed dandelion stems. For the first time, she didn't even hesitate as Clint fixated sheepishly upon her. In her palm, the possibilities unfolded, their beginnings and middles and endings. Natasha clasped his hand in hers, leading him over to the porch, up the steps, and into the house that they would mend together.


End file.
